Successful firms, such as Intel, maintain an innovative
environment, seek continuous performance improvement, favor customer orientation
(e.g. through partnerships with customers and suppliers), enhance results
orientation, and place speed of creation, defense and development
of value-chains at the core of their strategic focus. To maintain its leadership,
Intel developed "war rooms", and encouraged informal relationships that
crisscrossed organizational boundaries. Nevertheless, when Intel had to
face InfoWar practices, it had to acknowledge that the company failed to
prevent and to anticipate large-scale Info-destabilization.

New businesses live on the brink of disasters. Yet,
"organizations have many stabilizers but quite often lack proper destabilizers".
We will argue in this paper that InfoWar — informational arena-based warfare
— has been thought within the boundaries of old schemata that will no longer
be accurate in the XXIst century. These
schemata includes misconceptions of management, organizations, economics,
welfare and of purpose of development.

We will investigate, in the footsteps of Hedberg,
Jönsson, Starbuck, Steele, Wilensky, and many others, design principles
that worked, and no longer worked. Founding our comments on observations
of real-world experiences, we end with recommendations as to prepare nations,
organizations and people for the forthcoming paradigm shift: from InfoWar
to Knowledge Warfare (K-Warfare).

Why Policy Makers Got
Trapped in the Information Paradigm

World leaders, who mostly belong to a generation
that is not born with a computer at home, has been strongly influenced
by cybernetics. In a cybernetic world, economic and social life is seen
as a system ; values are categorized ; economic systems are modeled ; social
structures are typologized, and ideologies are invented to put all these
systems together. In such a world, policy makers are not long to assume
that information is power, and systematized information, the structure
of power itself.

History has been, so far, consistent with such implicit
assumptions. Power was centralized, and, therefore, needed centralized
intelligence. The world was organized into blocks, and therefore, needed
compartmented information. Economic and social systems were hierarchical,
and therefore, hierarchical information made sense.

From the starting point, this cybernetic view of
the world was quite erroneous. As Varela and Maturana pointed out, neurons
that participate in the building of "vision" only account for 20% from
the eyes' retinas, whereas 80% of them come from other parts of the brain.
In other words, 80% of our "vision" is internally constructed. Vision is
mostly knowledge, not information. Furthermore, this knowledge is mostly
tacit ; it escapes our individual or collective awareness.

Eventually, people — including policy-makers — learn
without being aware of what is being learned ; code without being aware
of coding ; and most dramatically, learn without having intended or planned
to learn. Most learning is incidental.

Emerging "Information Warfare" doctrines fail to
acknowledge this fragility of learning. Mapping without knowing is a non-sense.
Mapping, as an act of "vision", is mostly derived from these 80% of neurons,
in our brains and not in our retinas, that participate in the construction
of images, and help us to transform noticed and unnoticed stimuli into
sense-making. Such weapons as "private-sector communication satellite constellations
that instantly link individuals, on-demand high-resolution imaging spacecraft
and rapidly evolving gigabit/sec.-class networks" are no less than phantasmagorias,
if we neglect to take care of these disturbing, — yet remaining —, autonomous
neurons of our brains.

A small firm of less than 12 employees, named "Indigo",
is an exemplar. Indigo produces and publishes five confidential newsletters,
including the Intelligence Newsletter, a well-repute source of intelligence
among policy makers in Europe. Myths and rumors circulate, seeing in Indigo's
high accuracy a ploy of obscure foreign intelligence. French readers suspect
foreign intrusions. Foreign readers suspect French manipulation. In fact,
Indigo is nothing else than an efficient "knowledge-refinery", that is
to say a firm purposefully designed for the efficiency of its knowledge
generation. In-site observation shows that "far from being pliable, knowledge
generates its own path of transformation, while simultaneously transforming
and being transformed by its organizational settings. An implication is
that those who would manage knowledge should respect this propensity for
autonomous development". Cautious towards systematized information gathering,
Indigo's staff is operating within a "community of practice" — i.e. an
intensive and highly-contextualized socialization process —, and favors
HUMINT. The whole organization is focused on sense-making instead of information-collection.
Intensity and depth of internal and external socializations are considered
as the core organizational competitive advantage. The rate of defaults
is close to zero. The overall performance, in terms of growth and ROI,
is twice higher that similar organizations such as the The Economist
Intelligence Unit.

To understand such a performance, let us remind that
information is not knowledge, and then let us investigate how to deal with
knowledge, instead of information. As general Francks pointed out, "Vietnam
was the first battlefield use of computers. The Univac 1005, which the
25th infantry division installed in 1966 at Cu Chi,
filled an entire van (…) Images of the enemy and terrain were captured
with conventional cameras and television with light intensification devices,
radar, and infrared devices. Sensors and high altitude reconnaissance scanned
100,000 square miles per hour providing commanders with a heretofore unknown
view of the battlefield". Meanwhile, Vietnamese population was digging
underground tunnels. Similarly, French Foreign Legion was settling its
command outposts on hills, as to dominate battlefields, and meanwhile,
Vietnamese soldiers were digging the crops and burying themselves in the
face and "vision" of the enemy… Proving, if necessary, that neurons from
the retinas only account for 20% of vision. What was dramatically missing
was not information, but knowledge in general, and an adequate form of
"knowing" in particular. "We are on the threshold of an era where order
can be achieved largely through knowledge… not necessarily through physical
order"

Knowledge vs.
Information, Knowing vs. Knowledge

Understanding the differences between 'knowledge'
and 'knowing' is essential to a successful entry in this new paradigm.
"One contemporary cliché is that more and more turbulent settings
are requiring organizations to use more and more knowledge, and that this
in turn forces organizations to process more and more information". A knowledge-base
is all the learning of people and institutions more or less explicitly
encapsulated in minds, brains, models, signals, culture, rules, guidelines.
Greek philosophers used to categorize this human knowledge in three ensembles
: the techne, the embodied technical know-how ; the episteme,
the abstract generalization derived from knowing-how, and the phronesis,
the wisdom of social practice, i.e. the ability to derive aggregates from
social learning. In modern management literature, the investigation of
knowledge within and in-between organizations is merely derived from the
same twenty-four centuries old conceptualization. The conventional view
is that the relevant knowledge comes from explicit situational analysis,
i.e. it is objective knowledge. As Detienne and Vernant pointed out, education
in the Judeo-Christian world has been strongly influenced by the pursuit
of Truth as the sole goal of knowledge generation. Starting in 400 BC.,
knowledge is systematically understood as "objective knowledge", leaving
'meaner' forms of knowledge and knowing, — such as conjectural knowledge
—, disregarded and low-grade. The governmental intelligence cycle itself
is a pursuit of objective knowledge. Intelligence generation is driven
by an objectivation force, that discards unreliable information and sources
according to truth-setting rules. As Wilensky put it, the intelligence
bodies are overcrowded with "facts-and-figures men", who "introduce a 'rational-responsible'
bias" (…) "Facts-and-figures men are preoccupied with rational argument
and criteria; their technical competence compels opposing parties to be
more careful or honest in their use of information, to match each other
expert for expert, fact for fact". Thus, current doctrines of InfoWar are
all implicitly based on a biased assumption that large-scale truth seeking
is superior to depth and differentiation of knowing modes. Such doctrines
are based on the belief that the process of organizations and nation's
'getting into difficulties' is essentially one of the degradation and increasing
disutility of their knowledge-base. Yet, when doctrine generators are asked
to define such a "knowledge-base", they have to face their incapacity to
describe and to qualify it.

Knowledge-base, as a matter of fact, is a static
concept. It assumes that knowledge can be systematically put in the form
of a representation, and neglects all various forms of tacit knowledge
in general, and collective tacit knowledge, in particular. Thus, the same
Judeo-Christian bias applies to the representation of knowledge. Knowledge
is assumed to be merely a long-term representation ; is seen as a commodity
; is talked in terms of volume and stocks ; is described with a vocabulary
borrowed to hardware management. In such a biased conception of knowledge,
one usually distinguish short-term, or procedural, representations that
can be immediately acted on one side, and long-term, or structural, representations,
whose access and development need several apprenticeships.

As a consequence, focus should be put on the advancement
of "knowing", instead of the accumulation of "knowledge". Development of
national intelligence capabilities should therefore target the improvement
of interpretational and sense-making skills, instead of pursuing the utopia
of the ubiquity of a knowledge seen as a commodity. Such a self-deception
has its roots in the reproducibility of information. Redundancy of information
is a serious waste of resources in most industrial democracies. For instance,
in France, no less than 80 administrative bodies distribute to small and
large businesses the same information again and again. This redundant information
eventually leads to redundant intelligence administrations, leading to
the hypertrophy of bureaucratic, and inefficient, intelligence bodies.
The 1996 reorganization of the U.S. Intelligence Community is an exemplar
of this lack of focus on "knowing" capabilities, and of the exaggerated
attention given to the accumulation of "knowledge". In 1992, Ernest R.
May "urges the Committee to think of individuals in the Intelligence Community
as well as of their organizational boxes". Frank Carlucci, a former Assistant
to the President for National Security Affairs, underlines that "Congress
could render a valuable service if it would lead the Intelligence Community
through the process of cultural change that many of our businesses have
gone through". As Orton and Callahan noted, "unwarranted duplication remains
a problem; and intelligence remains too isolated from the governmental
process it was created to serve".

The focus on "knowledge as a commodity" vs. the "improvement
of knowing" can also be observed in the conceptual frameworks that are
judged to be a good basis for knowledge-based warfare. Col. Steven J. Sloboda,
formerly in charge of long-range planning for U.S. Space Command asserts:
"Space is literally the fabric upon which we will weave our approach to
knowledge-based warfare. Space is the enabling ingredient… Fortunately,
the convergence of our experience in space operations, communications networking,
and information processing seems to make the move to knowledge-based warfare
achievable". Unfortunately, human souls and minds are not fully readable
from outer space. The "folk theory" that trust moves not words might well
be misleading in a knowledge-based paradigm. The Vietnam, Gulf and former
Yugoslavia experiences — three modern war theaters with intensive use of
satellite information — are exemplar cases of the limits of satellite cartography
in penetrating human intents. Moreover, such experiences underline the
limits of InfoWar. As Dragnich noted, the "so-called information war" that
has been proposed "to wage against the Serbs is ridiculous. The Serbs do
not need the outside world to tell them that communism and Slobodan Milosevic
are bad"

Misconceptions of management

Thus, management should be designed and understood
as primarily a knowledge-generation process. Many companies tend to follow
management practices that take the physical world for granted. When the
Berlin Wall fell, Finland believed that the announced geostrategic shift
would require the acquisition of combat fighters. The market was estimated
at around US$ 3 billions. Four French companies, Snecma, Matra, Dassault
and Thomson, and the Defense Administration decide to enter the race for
this competitive bid. When the newly settled French Economic Intelligence
and Corporate Strategies Commission, at the French Office of Planning,
decided to develop a few exemplar case studies, the case of the Mirage
2000-5 was selected. The audit revealed that lack of coordination and knowledge
sharing was at the roots of the commercial failure. Managers who negotiated
the contract were chosen according to corporate criteria. Internal competition
prevented any attempt of crisscrossed knowledge transfers. Another French
firm, the Aerospatiale, which has an in-depth knowledge of the Finland
aeronautics market was not consulted by the competing pool. In the absence
of a long-term knowledge strategy, the State was unable to display any
capitalization of knowledge on Finland. The lack of longitudinal capitalization
of geostrategic knowledge led to the incapability of designing required
distinctive attributes in the competitive bid. In the middle of the negotiation
process, the political turmoil in Finland was perceived as an obstacle,
whereas the American companies reinforced their coordination and lobbying
to use these elections as a leverage for their offer. Indeed, the French
consortium was competing with a hypothetical F-16 offer, while the American
were proposing the F-18. As Wilensky warned, "in all complex social systems,
hierarchy, specialization, and centralization are major sources of distortion
and blockage of intelligence".

However, it seems that this analysis can be put a
step forward. In this intelligence failure, the main cause was the inappropriateness
of management practices to a non-market environment. The French consortium
failed to recognize and acknowledge forces that acted outside the narrow
borders of the targeted market. In a transversal environment (i.e. that
implies geopolitical, geoeconomical, local politics, technology and society),
with a transversal offer (i.e. typically a consortium of different firms,
proposing dual technologies), traditional "market management" fails to
grab critical issues. As R.D. Laing noted, the range of what we think and
do is limited by what we fail to notice… If non-market knowledge is not
integrated in management duties and skills, it is bound to be neglected.
Thus, "non-market strategies result from a management process that incorporates
knowledge of the market and nonmarket environments, information about specific
issues, and conceptual frameworks that guide strategy formulation and implementation".

Misconceptions of organizations

Most organizations are unfit for the management and
capitalization of intangible assets in general, and counter-productive
in terms of knowledge generation. However true one "must analyze the flow
of information along the value chain as well as the movement of goods",
it might be quite insufficient to cope with the new conditions of competitiveness.

The whole concept of value-chain, and the education
given to managers on that matter, should be revised. Managers and scholars
are used to thinking of organizations as stable contractual bodies, with
physical locations (headquarters, plants, departments, etc.), while the
new economics call for a focus on industries as systems, rather than buildings
and walls. Bo Hedberg introduces the concept of "imaginary organizations"
to picture these new economic conditions.

An "imaginary organization" is a knowledge-infrastructure
concerning markets, potential opportunities for production and creation
of value-chains. Hedberg uses the example of Gant, an American garment
brand that was bought by Swedish investors, and developed worldwide. Gant
has no proprietary plants. The whole organization consists of a team of
managers that coordinate market needs and channels with a constellation
of independent suppliers. The core competitive advantage of Gant lies in
the corporation's ability to coordinate market needs with independent systems'
inputs. Gant uses its knowledge infrastructure to define and find matches
between independent production and design capabilities and market needs.

This whole perspective of "knowledge infrastructures"
is likely to be the dominant paradigm in the coming century. Hewlett Packard
in France got rid of local middle management supervisory staff to replace
it with a centralized information platform at its headquarters. The "information
infrastructure" collects customers' needs and requests, and dispatches
the information directly to managers and maintenance engineers' notebook
screens through Electronic Data Interchange. Locally, Hewlett Packard suppressed
many subsidiaries and branches. Managers and maintenance engineers work
at home, being constantly on the move to meet customers' needs and specifications
on sites. The whole organization is transformed in a knowledge-generation
node, with many peripheries where action is taking place.

Could such a model be implemented on a national scale,
and what would be social and welfare consequences? It is quite probable
that such a "knowledge infrastructure" could be designed and implemented
on a national scale. It would require administrations, large and small
corporations and individuals to share a communal information infrastructure
where demands and supplies of tangibles and intangibles would find their
matches. In such a perspective, competitive advantage of nations would
eventually lie in national ability and speed to generate (and discontinue
without social and economic costs) virtual value chains to operate them.
Attempts such as the Department of Commerce's Advocacy Center in the United
States, and the Committee for Economic Security and Competitiveness (CCSE)
attached to the Secretariat General de la Defense National (SGDN) in France,
are evidently pursuing such a model.

Both the Advocacy Center and the CCSE pursue an objective
of coordination and alertness between administrative bodies and private
organizations. However, while the Advocacy Center is located at an operational
level with a direct link with the intelligence community, the French CCSE
is placed under the authority of the Prime Minister, and its main focus
is a supra-coordination of administrative bodies (Ministries of Finances,
Defense, Foreign Affairs, French Office of Planning…) that already fulfill,
more or less properly, a coordination role. Political ambitions, in France
and in the United States, and intelligence communities' internal conflicts,
are however impeding the performance of both the French and American experiences.

Misconceptions of economics
& welfare

Economics theories mainly failed, for they either
never succeeded to address the benevolence issue in economic development,
or rapidly lost its focus when attempting to grab it. Myths that surround
the development of InfoWar or InfoEconomics, are mainly myths of malevolence:
'cyberwarriors', 'viruses', 'logic bombs', etc. Whereas we leave the paradigm
of economics of forces, physical order, heaviness and superiority of gender
on genius, we tend to bring with us the bad habits of past and history.
InfoWar experts and analysts react to the emergence of the 'knowledge paradigm'
with a defense attitude towards the unexpected. Whereas a global knowledge
infrastructure could have been an opportunity to substitute a threat-equilibrium
with 'integrative power', policy-makers tend to project ideologies and
doctrines that proved to be wrong, instead of inventing the conceptual
framework that will fit the new economics.

Two biases lie behind the design and mission of these
governmental-level information coordination bodies. The first bias could
be pictured as an "intelligentsialization" of the information infrastructure.
Both governments have chosen a top-down implementation of their information
infrastructure, thus applying obsolete governmental schemata to the management
of knowledge. While experts are calling for the development of the largest
"knowledge sharing culture", national knowledge-infrastructure projects
are being drawn with an elitist buyest. It might occur, around 2010, that
such decisions were historical self-deceptions. Doing so, governments tend
to confuse information logistics (a structural perspective) with knowledge
sharing (an interactionist perspective). In other words, artificial efficiency
is reached today because decision makers and policy makers who share information
already hold the requisite knowledge to make this information actionable.
Thus, it gives the illusion that the development of an information structure
is a necessary and sufficient condition to attain a national knowledge
infrastructure.

On the contrary, such a policy will prove to be counter-productive.
It will eventually create an isolated body of upper-level knowledge, disconnected
with the reality of social development and learning, and therefore, increasing
the gap between people who act, learn and talk, and people being acted,
learned and talked. Economic performance might be reached through an routinized
logistics of generic knowledge amongst business leaders, industrialists
and politicians, but social performance is already doubtful. Research findings
suggest that permanent improvement and continuous learning cannot be achieved
in situations of disarticulated socialization. Information infrastructures,
as designed in American and French projects, favor information exchange,
including possible use of information highways, and neglect to design proper
socialization devices that would enhance permanent and collective sense-making.
Furthermore, such knowledge infrastructures are already perceived by the
population as jobs-destructive, in opposition with almost all fourteen
points of Deming's principles of continuous transformation. One of these
principles says that fear should be driven out, so that everyone may work
effectively. Surrounded by myths of malevolence, economic intelligence
sharing-infrastructures, on the contrary, announces a quest for economics
of coordination costs, worldwide economics of scale, and the birth of a
knowledgeable elite, with privileged and discretionary access to uprising
knowledge infrastructures. Hewlett Packard was an examplar on that point.
Local managers disappeared, leaving their place to management technicians
"being acted" by electronic data interchange. Many firms, more or less
consciously, took this curve. Asea Brown Bovery (ABB) reduced its corporate
staff, after its fusion, from more than 4000 to less than 300 "global managers".
Given the fact that middle managers already live and work in suburban areas,
effect is an increasing gap between geographically-concentrated conceptual
knowledge, and geographically-dispersed procedural know-how. Instead of
encouraging a cooperative culture, knowledge infrastructures may implement
a perennial rupture between an exclusive and very small knowledgeable suprastructure,
and a very large, fragmented and desocialized, cognitively-taylorized substructure.

In Deming's theory, effectiveness is derived from
continuous efforts "toward the simultaneous creation of cooperative and
learning organization to facilitate the implementation of process-management
practices, which, when implemented, support customer satisfaction and organizational
survival through sustained employee fulfillment and continuous improvement
of processes, products, and services". Similar thinking can be found in
intelligence history in general, and in the XVIth century Elizabethan doctrine
of governmental intelligence in particular: "Elizabeth was intellectually
the most enlightened monarch of her time. Francis Bacon writes that she
was "undued with learning," and "to the end of her life she sets hours
for reading… (more than) scarcely any student of her time". One way to
please her was to talk "In Praise of Knowledge", as Essex did with his
essay, most probably written by Bacon". Queen Elizabeth I's intelligence
shadow adviser, Sir Francis Bacon, was the author of the Advancement
of Learning in 1605, and also authored an essay entitled "Followers
and Friends" in 1597. The other intelligence doctrine advisor, Sir William
Cecil, authored on his part, of a forward-looking memorandum entitled Matters
Necessary to be Done, Troubles… that all May Presently Ensue, Things Necessary
to be Considered, With Speed, with Foreboding, With Foresight, Plots and
Designs. Speed, consistency and sharing of knowledge-generation processes
on a large-scale base were already put at the center of national development
strategies.

The difference between 16th century Great Britain
and current industrial democracies, however, is a fundamental shift from
obedience to commitment of the governed. To continue to design
information infrastructures in the Elizabethan style, is overlooking that
knowledge is nowadays widely distributed. "Cooperation, in this context,
is synonymous with collaboration among different individuals, groups, or
organizations, where all entities are engaging in noncompetitive, mutually
beneficial, win-win activities".

Why Shifting from I-War
to K-War: A case-study

As Wilensky once put it, "information has always
been a source of power, but it is now increasingly a source of confusion.
In every sphere of modern life, the chronic condition is surfeit of information,
poorly integrated or lost somewhere in the system". Roots of such failures
can been found (a) in the persistent confusion between knowledge and information,
(b) on the large-scale focus that has been given in education to cumulating
of knowledge-bases vs. permanent improvement of the diversity and flexibility
of modes of knowing, and (c) in the failure of scientists in integrating
in new organizational forms and purposes, the advancements of social cognition
and collective learning. Yet, "managers are becoming increasingly aware
that informed adaptability is at a premium and to attain it they may need
different modes of organization to find and solve different types of problems".
Nevertheless, and consistent with a perception of knowledge as a commodity,
"organization" on one side, and "knowledge' on the other side, are systematically
approached distinctively. Organization theorists propose many alternatives
and original organizational forms, but leave managers with the duty of
generating adequate knowledge to operate them. Knowledge sociologists put
much emphasis on the many forms of socializations that participate in the
building of cognitive skills, but are reluctant to study how organizational
design and knowledge generation interact.

German definition of the world "Intelligenz" could
shed some light on such an intricated issue. The Wirtschafts-Lexikon, a
principal German dictionary, in defining intelligence, puts "an emphasis
on mental processes geared to adaptation, integration, and recognizing
significant relationships. These processes are interesting: were we to
consider them as characteristics of some organizational form, we would
come very near to the 'intelligence system' definition (…) German thought
also recognizes the importance of the perception of causal connection and
of capacity for combination". To achieve the integration of "knowing" and
"organizing", German authorities have historically put a strong focus on
the continuity of education to intelligence in the society. After World
War II, the Economic Police was reintegrated in national industrial infrastructures.
Today, German students receive education from German Generals and Senior
Military Officers in most business schools as to maintain a longitudinal
awareness of the role played by intelligence and military art in the understanding
and design of business organizations.

The Perrier case illustrates the importance of "the
perception of causal connection and of capacity for combination", so much
favored by German intelligence. On July 3, 1989, Perrier and Pepsi Co are
negotiating the creation of a joint-venture, in which Perrier would hold
65% of the shares. The negotiations are disrupted on July 16. In August
1989, Perrier sells its subsidiary, the Société Parisienne
de Boissons Gazeuses, which distributes PepsiCo in France to its main competitor,
Coca Cola. This competitive move is perceived as a retaliation. In November
1989, PepsiCo denounces the poor performance of Perrier in the management
of its license, announcing the disruption of all contractual arrangements
for December 1990. PepsiCo took Perrier to court on November 8, 1990 ;
and announced, a day after, that it would be eventually interested in taking
over the soft-drinks activities of Perrier, if stock price would be more
attractive. Meanwhile, the Coca Cola stock reached the historical price
of 72$ on November 18, 1989.

On January 19, 1990, a laboratory of North Carolina
discovers traces of Benzene in samples of Perrier mineral water. Experts
suspect the information to have been transmitted through a mole in Perrier
production plant in Vergeze. "Causal connection" can be made between the
test results, and the nearby location of a Coca Cola plant. The laboratory
Manager does not remember having replaced its test equipment, but "combined"
information show strong evidence of all tests equipment being graciously
replaced by a Coca Cola sponsoring of the laboratory. On February 2, 1990,
the Food and Drug Administration warns Perrier that mineral water being
distributed in the United States contains Benzene.

At that time, Perrier is a potential target for a
take-over. Nestle would eventually be interested, and has made aggressive
competitive moves on the European market. In particular, Nestle has managed
to sing an exclusivity with Walt Disney Europe ; walking on Coca Cola traditional
proprietary territory. On February 5, 1990, the Food and Drug Administration
confirms the presence of Benzene in Perrier mineral water. On February
10, Perrier is forced to acknowledge, but reacts very quickly by announcing
that all bottles will be withdrawn from the market. On February 12, Perrier's
stock is loosing 14%. Suntory, the Japanese distributor of the brand announces
the withdrawal of 10.000 bottle cases from the Japanese market. On February
14, German authorities forbids Perrier mineral water on their markets.
The French Commission of Stock Operations (COB) announces an investigation
on suspicious stock movements that occurred on February 9. Sales are stopped
in the United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and
Hong Kong.

The InfoWar could have found its end in this last
event, but Perrier held 25% of the American sparkling waters' market, with
an annual sales of US$ 500 millions. Perrier reacted with great dexterity
facing such an Info-Destabilization. Financial markets' observers were
promptly reassured on the integrity of the natural water source. The human
error was fully explained with a worldwide dissemination of accurate counter-information.
Sanitary authorities announces the results of scientific investigations:
"The daily consumption of half-liter of Perrier during 30 years do not
increase the risk of cancer". The Perrier stock gains 6.3% on Paris stock
exchange.

The second phase of this large-scale InfoWar arises
on February 20, 1990. A 36 years old Athenian woman asks Perrier 7,5 millions
Francs for the damage caused by the explosion of a bottle that supposedly
led to the loss of her eye. Evidence shows that the incident occurred on
August 25, 1986, that is to say four years before. Several similar court
cases appear in different places of the globe : a lawyer in Bridgeport
defends Mrs Vahlsing ; eight similar cases of Class Action appear in Connecticut
and Pennsylvania. Perrier discovers that Kroll, the investigative consultancy
that took care of its information in the United States, has withdrawn key-information
from its reports. In 1991, Nestle finally took over Perrier.

Very similar cases of InfoWar, such as the Shell-Greenpeace
Brentspar's case, or the case of "benzene threat" for Octel Co. Ltd in
the United Kingdom, lead to the same conclusions : (a) an isolated organization
cannot cope alone with large-scale Info-Destabilization without considerable
loss ; (b) successful large-scale InfoWars involve interorganizational
agreements, and collective manipulations of worldwide information infrastructure
(mass media, scientific institutions, customer groups, etc.), and most
importantly, (c) ability to rapidly make sense (i.e. generating knowledge)
is superior in counter-fighting InfoWars than systematic collection and
compilation of open information, already coming from a corrupted or contaminated
information infrastructure.

Conclusion

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making
the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity". Preparing
for the knowledge warfare paradigm requires a strong focus on reengineering
of the whole education process of industrialized democracies. This is that
simple, but policy makers will face strong resistance, especially from
academics. Integration of strategic issues assessment should be put as
early as possible in education. The current process is cumulative. The
required process is interactionist. Instead of thinking of education in
terms of sequentiality, policy makers should design education in terms
of interconnectivity and interoperability. Many organizations would like
today to increase the awareness of strategic issues among their engineers'
population, and vice-versa, to increase the awareness of technological
issue among their commercial task-forces. To do so, they design new systems,
centralized economic intelligence units that dispatches technical of market
information to both communities. Some firms, like Intel, encourage hybrid
teams of engineers and managers as to fertilize crisscrossed issues. This
is a result of a Taylorized learning and knowing. Emphasis should put on
judgment, cogntivie skills, cognitive flexibility, incongruity and ambiguity
tolerance at the youngest age. In the knowledge warfare paradigm, strategic
advantage does not lie in the concentration of facts-and-figures, but in
the complementarity and singularity of the brains who interpret them. National
widespread sense-making capability matters more than electronic information
highways.

. General F. M. Franks, Jr., "Winning the InformationWar:
Evolution and Revolution", speech delivered at the Association of the U.S.
Army Symposium, Orlando, Fl., February 8, 1994, in Vital Speeches of
the Day, Vol. 60, Issue 15, p. 455.

. General F.M. Franks, op. cit., p. 456. It
is noticeable that Harry Howe Ransom's "Strategic Intelligence" article
(1973, General Learning Press), when using the Viet Cong guerilla as an
exemplar, and using an intelligence estimate NIE 143/53-61, "Prospects
for North and South Vietnam", dated 15 August 1961, does not mention the
existence of the Vietnamese underground logistics, and suspects the "Bloc
to build up the eastern part of south Laos, improving the roads, mountain
trails, and airfields, as a major supply channel" (p. 7). This is an exemplar
of applying a cultural mode of knowing that projects ethnocentric schemata
on a singular reality.

. H. Wilensky, 1967, "Organizational Intelligence", in The International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, David L. Sills (Ed.), Vol. 11,
New York: Macmillan & the Free Press, p. 321.

. J.C. Spender, Ph. Baumard, 1995, "An empirical investigation of change
in the knowledge leading to competitive advantage", Research Paper, presented
at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, in Vancouver, August
5, under the title "Turning troubled firms around: Case-evidence for a
Penrosian view of strategic recovery".

. The final report under the presidency of Henri Martre, and co-authored
by Ph. Baumard, Ph. Clerc and C. Harbulot, was published by La Documentation
Française in Februrary 1994, under the title Intelligence économique
et stratégie des entreprises. The Mirage 200-5 case study was
withdrawed from final publication.